


Yet the Poison Lingers

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Can be read as gen, Gen, M/M, Post-Movie(s), Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 18:32:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It’s only now, at what is unfortunately not the end of his days, that Bond recognises Silva’s trap for what it is.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yet the Poison Lingers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flightinflame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightinflame/gifts).



> Prompt from flightinflame: _00Silva, traps_

It’s only now, at what is unfortunately not the end of his days, that Bond recognises Silva’s trap for what it is.

Funny, he’s been in so many criminal masterminds’ webs, even momentarily outwitted more often than he’d admit (and especially not on his mission reports – wouldn’t do to give them more excuses to cut him loose). He recalls the best with a certain fondness at night, seated with a tumbler and bottle of whiskey and his memories: Scaramanga’s funhouse, the game of cat and mouse accompanied by literal smoke and mirrors, or simply tied down to Goldfinger’s table with that ridiculous laser edging closer towards a rather less ridiculous end. He tends to gloss over some of the others, not least those splattered with blood and bruised by the spinning car and screaming as the rope hits him again, and never the hollow realisation of Venice (but dreams are tricky things).

There he goes again, down memory lane. It’s too long these days. It’s too easy for him to get lost somewhere along the way.

The thing is, Bond’s already lived his life, in most ways that people imagine when it comes to defining ‘living’. He’s loved a woman so intensely that it burnt itself onto his soul (a line for the girls that came afterwards – Bond doesn’t believe in souls), and he married another, who died in his arms. He’s fought and fucked his way across the world; deigned to save it more than a few times; even been resurrected. 

He is MI6’s longest serving double-oh agent, for the simple reason that nobody has managed to kill him. Were he the sentimental or philosophical type, he might suppose that the universe likes him; as it is, he considers his particular brand of luck as useful on some occasions and a damned nuisance on others. It all depends on whether or not there’s anything to do with the time he still has on his hands. 

Or, to put it quite simply, for years and years he has only cared about living because even MI6 rarely employs corpses.

(He has no interest in their post-mortem plan. Becoming yet another planted body feels too much like doing what they want.)

It’s been a fine deal, as far as Bond’s concerned: killing with a purpose. The simple reality of it is that, now that he is older and if not wiser then certainly more self-aware, killing is his one great skill. The rest – the tracking, the fighting – all falls into place afterwards. He looks at his principles; his ideas of an England that can still be protected, that he wants to protect, even, and like so many men throughout history, he can only serve them with what talents he’s found himself to possess.

He can finally see that now, as in the moments when blood finally clears from the water. Looking back, he can see past the old Q’s gadgets and the camp and circumstance that seem to stalk his ridiculous contrived life, and really, what constant has there ever been for him besides murder?

M, perhaps.

But M is dead and gone.

All part of the trap.

_We are the last two rats._

The words started eating away at him (he allows himself a small smile at that, devoid of humour but at least going through the motions) in the moments after their deaths. Lying there on the floor of the chapel where his parents were married and buried, feeling nothing and yet endlessly aware of ripples somewhere close by, his parting words to Silva circled and circled around the nothingness of his mind.

 _Last rat standing_ might just be the most appropriate title he’s ever claimed.

He thinks he might have repeated it for Eve, when she came with the rest to find the carnage. Her face had tightened, but otherwise she hadn’t shown any reaction. Good girl, she’ll go far.

Only when it had come once more to the worst part of any mission – the aftermath, the ‘recovery’, the habitual click of the breaking bottle seal replacing that of the ready pistol – those words still hadn’t left him. All told, he’d spent less time with Silva than some of his other, well, ‘foes’ would probably be the word – these days he would probably have had Blofeld’s number by now – and yet he’s left far more of an impression than the standard.

And it’s not just M’s death.

Nor is it M’s life.

M’s sins were her own, for all that they increasingly inconvenienced those around her. Bond never thought he had been her only favoured child (no, agent, ‘child’ is Silva’s word), and he certainly never believed he was special enough to warrant special treatment. With their positions reversed, yes, M might well have sold him out to save agents. She was a callous bitch and the best boss Bond reckons he could have hoped for. 

It’s not M that’s bothering him – at least, not in the dark of his house (never a home, no signs of life here). She haunts him in the corridors of the new MI6, everything shining and refreshed and wiped clean, where he stalks like the old dog people long to shoot but feel so very sentimental over. 

Christ, Mallory talks to him as if they’re somehow equals, and yes, to a certain extent Bond supposes that they are. They’re both soldiers grown old and surprised by that fact. But Bond hasn’t left the field yet and an M without any distance isn’t an M he can trust. It just reminds him that he is nothing but a relic these days.

Bond had chosen to eat the only other rat who might understand – no, _did_ understand, despite all that grotesque pantomime there had been that darkness that spoke of torture and knives and unsmiling faces in the mirror. He vaguely recalls some line about staring into an abyss from an otherwise boring lesson at school – he can’t really remember the other half, doesn’t think it’s important – and those had been Silva’s eyes. Incredible, really, what was there once you dug deep enough.

Rather like what he’s begun to see beneath the shell of the arrogant alcoholic womaniser he finds waiting in his old reports.

Now that all is said and done, after a few too many drinks, he finds himself imagining other outcomes in a way he’s never bothered with before. Christ, he’s getting maudlin in his old age. But there it is: not just the worlds where M isn’t dead, but those when he properly hears what Silva was saying – the offer lying embedded in flirtation, not just sex but a partnership between two without anybody else to understand them – and every time it’s replayed he chooses differently.

(It’s not just that he’s wondering what it would be like to fuck somebody he actually connected with again. But he won’t deny – for all his practice – that the idea would have had some appeal. Maybe for a change he might even have felt something – the spark alone had finally been enough to wake him out of whatever dream his second life has stranded him in.)

Eat each other or everybody else.

Which makes Bond – James – the only survivor, and for the first time, he wonders about the future.

Eve’s bullet might have sent him to death and back, yet even in the listlessness afterwards, he didn’t think about what came next. He just existed, the only way he knew how; at the first summons, just through the headlines, he went back because there was nothing there.

Now he realises that there’s nothing anywhere.

He might still find the odd mastermind – again, a little old-fashioned, along with his exploding pens and Aston Martins – but they’ll all be shadows of the past. If he wants to carry on, Bond will have to update, move with the times; upgrade to a new model. (Q’s speeches are peppered with these familiar phrases, forcing Bond to reflect when he isn’t listening on how little humans change.)

What’s the point?

He’s not entirely averse to new tricks, but he isn’t sure why he should bother. Silva highlighted that Bond is no longer the man MI6 wants, ambiguous but in none of the right ways. Bond is still acting out the stories of long ago, continuing a fight with his fellow rats which had now, finally, come to a close.

He’s wondered who the other rats are supposed to be. At first he’d assumed that Silva simply meant enemies; then everybody; and finally he’s concluded that maybe Silva was referring to their fellow agents. After all, Bond is the last of his kind, and in more ways than one.

He never used to think like this. Silva did this to him: phrased it all in terms of metaphors bundled up with home truths and delivered with a sideways smile and a hollow face that was all too real for even Bond to escape from. He painted Bond’s world in such clear-cut colours that despite being gone he keeps coming back.

Silva knew that Bond needs a challenge. Needs ‘hope’, if not the variety that the shrinks recognise. (Touchy-feely bullshit, trying to get inside Bond’s head, nobody ever cared before. They just cared about whether he did the damned job, and on that front, he has succeeded again and again and yes, he’ll say, young people today have no bloody gratitude.)

Silva died because he’d made the only other option joining him (Bond still isn’t sure how Silva warped the world like that, turned a simple enough mission into some sort of psychological hell, from a single bullet to his only real home burning, brought it all back to them and binding them together so strongly that Bond dreams of seaweed and ropes dragging and holding him down and Silva smiling, always bloody _smiling_ ). Silva made Bond shoot him because he knew that was what Bond would do, and fuck, he knew Bond wouldn’t last very long as a sole survivor.

Apparently, there’s only so much fucking and killing in the world before you need an excuse to carry on.

His only real complaint these days is that after surviving so many deathtraps, it’s actually rather hard to pick a way to die that feels right.

Bond is a man with expensive but consistent tastes: tailored suits, vintage cars, stirred martinis. Granted, he’ll settle for less more than readily, but too often it feels more like regressing.

(Scorpions and cheap booze. That had been a blast from the past.)

It means pills seem dull, guns seem messy, and falling, well, he’s already done that. Didn’t take.

He refuses to let the fucking children who think they run the world these days take him out. He is James fucking Bond and he is not going to die by some lucky shot from a teenager whose voice hasn’t broken yet.

_Life clung to me like a disease._

Bond hadn’t truly appreciated Silva’s words until he’d tried getting rid of the bloody thing.

Better to die before you get bored, he realises now. Better to go out the way all double-ohs should – even if it is that slow decline into pills and nightmares that he’s seen before and refuses to let happen (bloody degrading).

He needs another madman with a laser. He needs explosions and the sort of story that fits the legend they’ve cooked up for him. You don’t escape a Komodo Dragon to catch rabies from a dog on your street.

Fuck it, he needs Silva. 

Trapped in his own skin; screaming to get out, even as it smiles and says all the right words and passes their psych evals if only to prove that they’re wrong.

He knows, had a different rat won, that this is exactly what Silva would have been feeling. That’s why he’d been so determined to die, at the end. It meant that he’d won.

Somebody finally figured out how to beat James Bond, 007, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, etcetera.

They just had to let him live.


End file.
